CRYPTO-PERSONA is a philo-fiction/non-philosophy performance lab by Yvette Granata and Shane Farrell.

The Crypto-Persona Lab aims to invert the epistemological foundations of contemporary dataveillance structures. It is an attempt to intervene in the correlative logic of data tracking systems that increasingly create predictive algorithms that ascribe ‘personas’ to our data-bodies via the connections of GPS data and so-called ‘personal’ behaviors, such as in the logic of the context-accelerator persona API's produced by Skyhook, and other APIs.

While non-philosophy is a practice that uses philosophy as a material, and becomes thought-in-action, this workshop seeks to operationalize non-philosophy’s method in art practice as a collective performance of radical fiction and the exploration of crypto-personas as a method of epistemological resistance.

Instead of proving a relationship between the world and entity behavior, we seek to explore the possibility of another option – for the crypto-persona to exist differently. We are not in search for a new mode of evidence, but for stranger realities. In this traveling workshop, we present a crypto-matrix for performing the crypto-persona and invite participants to join.

The lab is meant to travel as a collective practice of crypto-persona proliferation.

The first instantiation of the crypto-performance lab was held at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY on Dec 2, 2015. During this lab, we created a collective youtube channel according to the crypto-matrix.

The Crypto-Persona is not a hive mind. It is a generic mind-ing/generic world(ing). Please take a few minutes to fill out our crypto-survey here: